What does it take to get a top player to record their games?

[krazyhades]

Very few YouTube channels have a competent, much less expert, player, and even fewer have multiple playlists of Angband games. I've watched all the Angband vids yet put out by fizzix (fizzixangband on YouTube), plus all those by tonberrytoby. I have the personal setup to do some streaming of my own games, which I'm happy to do but I'm definitely not at fizzix's level of game knowledge or execution, and even he is almost as lucky as he is good for his games it seems (no offense intended! luck is an important skill!). Okay a bit exaggerated, he's pretty good, but still.

What high-level streamers do you all know of? And what does it take to get e.g. Timo or other top-tier players to stream/commentate games?

[MattB]

I'm happy to do but I'm definitely not at fizzix's level of game knowledge or execution, and even he is almost as lucky as he is good for his games it seems (no offense intended! luck is an important skill!). Okay a bit exaggerated, he's pretty good, but still.

Good players just LOOK lucky.

EDIT: Which, by the way, is why bad players, such as myself, think that they're unlucky.

[Derakon]

I'd say three things hold me back (not that I'd say I'm necessarily any better than fizzix!):

1) No spare time.
2) No idea how to tackle the commentary issue; if I explain everything then I'll end up with a hoarse voice very quickly, but being too spare makes videos not that entertaining.
3) I prefer to play with a gigantic main play area and a few smaller windows; I don't think even YouTube's largest video size would give acceptable quality.

[Patashu]

Can't help with 1, but

2) No idea how to tackle the commentary issue; if I explain everything then I'll end up with a hoarse voice very quickly, but being too spare makes videos not that entertaining.

Record commentary in post-production?

3) I prefer to play with a gigantic main play area and a few smaller windows; I don't think even YouTube's largest video size would give acceptable quality.

Youtube has no maximum quality afaik. (Look at official TASVideos encodes, they go past 1080p HD and all the way to 'Original')

[DaviddesJ]

I'm not a "top player" (I'm not much into competition), but I also enjoy playing relatively slowly, way too slowly for someone else to watch on a video.

If you wanted more replays, the best way to do that would be to convince the developers to build game-logging software into the game itself. With modern technology, it would be easy to record every keystroke and event that happens in a game, and then replay the game at any pace you want, being able to see everything that's happening at any time. But someone would have to want to do that work.

[Timo Pietilä]

And what does it take to get e.g. Timo or other top-tier players to stream/commentate games?

About year of my time would be correct. I play slowly. 15 minutes every now and then, and stop to think about my gear for a long time every now and then. Everyone would just die on boredom watching me playing. I can easily play one char for a month.

I have this same phenomenon in Civ IV too, I watched TheMeInTeam win in 1/10 of time I use playing, and I think he isn't playing any better than I am (he forgets things, doesn't micromanage enough etc.).

[fph]

It would be nice to have an external observer comment on the game (as it is done for instance on starcraft matches and other games). Unfortunately with a turn-based game that doesn't work quite well (you can't pause/speed up at some points and check things such as the player inventory when needed).

[Timo Pietilä]

It would be nice to have an external observer comment on the game (as it is done for instance on starcraft matches and other games). Unfortunately with a turn-based game that doesn't work quite well (you can't pause/speed up at some points and check things such as the player inventory when needed).

While I said that I play slowly most of my epic combats in angband are played like they were real-time more than turn-based. In there I go other way around, no time to comment. Using macros, inscriptions and lightning-speed keypresses observer could not tell what just happened. Monster is dead/gone for apparently no reason at all.

Angband isn't very "lets play" -friendly game. fizzix lets play is about the best you can get. I'm quite impressed how he manages to control his playing and actually explain what he is doing.

[HallucinationMushroom]

It would be an easier to sell to get a top player to just agree to stream live play at a certain time, and field questions through text. If you are looking for an education bent... I guess it wouldn't necessarily have to be a character from birth to death. It could be a series of educational encounters, or something, with downloadable character files to play through as well.

[debo]

It would be nice to have an external observer comment on the game (as it is done for instance on starcraft matches and other games). Unfortunately with a turn-based game that doesn't work quite well (you can't pause/speed up at some points and check things such as the player inventory when needed).

I've been doing this with some of clouded's Sil games, although I sort of dropped the ball on it after the first few. Basically he was recording termcasts of his games, so I just load up the termcasts in a player and I can speed up / pause playback as needed.

The only issue is that sometimes you really do wish you could inspect inventory, scan the map, etc. and you can't, but that's not a huge deal. A bigger dealbreaker for many people is that you can only use a single window/terminal for this if you're going to use termcasts, since multiwindow termcasts aren't really a think and most players won't likely be using huge terminals to compensate.

[fizzix]

I want to record more videos. Sadly my laptop isn't really up to snuff for streaming. Otherwise I'd like to do that and just copy the videos to youtube.

Anyway, I might try to record more videos this fall, but it's possible that like every other hobby right now, it might also get pushed off until after January when I get my life back.

Can you term-cast from windows? I would be willing to try that also.

Derakon: I had to shrink my visible space down a bit for online playing leaving only the essentials up (monster list, item list). You can leave other stuff up outside of the recording area if you want, and remember to bring up the appropriate window if you want to talk about it. And yeah, your voice does tire, especially if you're not used to speaking. I used to do a lot of public speaking type activities.

[quarague]

I think a lot of the benefit of recorded games could be gotten with an automatic record and a replay turn by turn feature that also shows the key strokes. No idea how hard that is to code but being able to post a game (or part of one) on the forums and then have people look through it and discuss it has great educational value (angband playing education that is).
Then the stronger player doesn't need to comment his own game but can rather answer specific questions. Additionally a beginning player could post a game asking 'what did I do wrong, why did I die?'

[bio_hazard]

Brogue save files have the step-through playback as part of the save file. Granted Brogue is a much shorter game than Angband.

Crawl allows 3rd party commentary, but of course that's on the online server.

I can't imagine anyone going back through a game in post-production to comment on everything- that seems like a pretty onerous task.

I wonder if a good solution would be to NOT worry about doing the whole game. If someone is motivated to do a thorough job of the first 20-30 levels and spend time talking about the early game, that would be great. If someone is into the mid-game diving, the equipment swapping game, what vaults to crack, etc, that would also be useful. Same with end-game- your'e at DL90, just need some more slay evil bolts, clean up some nasty uniques, then take on 99 and 100... Or do the whole game but rather than commenting on everything, do the early game and any particularly interesting levels or tactics you want to share, and edit out the other stuff.

[Derakon]

I've given a little thought to trying to do a screenshot-based Let's Play of the game, too. Some coding work ought to allow me to play at my normal "resolution" while still having screenshots that don't blow out peoples' browser windows. Unfortunately, like all other projects the biggest obstacle is me having/taking the time to actually do it...

[Magnate]

I'm not a "top player" (I'm not much into competition), but I also enjoy playing relatively slowly, way too slowly for someone else to watch on a video.

If you wanted more replays, the best way to do that would be to convince the developers to build game-logging software into the game itself. With modern technology, it would be easy to record every keystroke and event that happens in a game, and then replay the game at any pace you want, being able to see everything that's happening at any time. But someone would have to want to do that work.

Someone actually did this - Pete Mack IIRC. It just didn't get incorporated into the master repo. (Pete himself said it was a non-trivial task to do so.)

This is exactly the kind of thing that made me want to work on Pyrel. In Pyrel I'd want to add that functionality if it wasn't already there. In Angband ... not so much.